


homeland for him, he said

by wanderNavi



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Gen, aftermath of systemic violence, this is mostly a writing exercise, to knock loose some bad habits I’ve recently picked up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:01:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27866557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: For no phenomenal reason, Robin bought this tiny house and its vast, weed-choked expansive lot for cheap soon after his – well, Lissa called it a resurrection. He certainly felt dragged out of the grave.
Kudos: 16





	homeland for him, he said

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips” by Mahmoud Darwish.
> 
> This fic isn’t a complete thought. It’s mostly just an old file with only one paragraph in it I had lodged in my hard drive for years that I then dusted off for something to practice with. There are some bad habits I’ve been developing in my longer fics I need to weed out before they can get any more entrenched.

> I asked him, but don’t you love the land? _My love is a picnic,_ he said, _a glass of wine, a love affair.  
> _ _\-- Would you die for the land?  
>  \-- No!_  
> […] _– And what about its love? Did it burn like suns and desire?  
> _ He looked straight at me and said: _I love it with my gun._

Mahmoud Darwish, “A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips”

* * *

The door screeched and croaked with a high-pitched cough, hungry for an oiling Robin couldn’t do until the incessant rain finally stopped. Chrom stood on the other side of the threshold, Frederick at his side, holding the umbrella over their heads while their pants soaked through regardless. With the drying stream of letter between the castle and Robin and the frantic ramping up of weddings and talks of succession, he hadn’t actually expected their visit. Nor had the rain turning the roads into riverbeds helped his estimations.

“Come on in,” he said and stepped aside for them to scuff dry boots and hang up cloaks.

* * *

For no phenomenal reason, Robin bought this tiny house and its vast, weed-choked expansive lot for cheap soon after his – well, Lissa called it a resurrection. He certainly felt dragged out of the grave. Every morning he awoke to sore bones and aching muscles. His nerves buzzed with the simultaneous sensation of being amputated and hyperreactive. Holding a pen sent electric sparks through his whole arm, straight through his shoulder. It grounded him while paging through stained records of past atrocities.

Many years ago, this house hung upon the crooked edge of a small town. The town had enough for its existence: a single slanted street, a central store where neighbors met and chatted amid the produce, a church with two rooms that doubles as a records archive. Under the cold sun of an early spring day, Robin stood amid the crushed brown stalks of chest high weeds, scratched hands in his pockets, and breath sighing out in small puffs. The black mouth of a collapsed brick and plaster wall hung open in silent agony. Only the teetering remains of chimneys marked the burned down plots of homes, like gravestones crumbling under the incessant beating fists of rain and age.

Besides him, Frederick breathed in deep through his nose, once. The wind teased his hair, playfully yanking on his sleeves. The watery sun caught his eye and he squinted through the glare.

“Does Chrom know?” Robin asked. They’d left him behind at Robin’s house to review the long notes Robin scratched out for him. “Did Emmeryn?”

Frederick shook his head, eyes still narrowed against the light. He slowly brought a hand up, trying to provide some relief for himself through shade. Robin tapped his flask of water against his right leg one more time for the wave of pins stabbing up through his thigh and hip.

“Chrom was still a boy during this phase of Exalt Phillip’s wars. Emmeryn … she might have. Later,” Frederick explained. “This is the whole town?”

“From here to that tree over there,” Robin pointed. “About five, ten minutes to walk across. Come on.”

They pushed aside the dried grass that grew resurgent and wild every year amid the stained yellow and brown shadows of their predecessors, the dense clumps of white flowers that bloomed in fall and now crystalized into hard, brown curls exploded open with white, fuzzy debris. The wind scrubbed its hand through the dead folds. Robin ignored the pink stained onto his aching ears and smeared over his cheeks by the chilled air. The trees shuddered with brown debris the autumn wind failed to hurl to the ground in one of its nightly, howling tears that smashed its fists against the drafty walls of Robin’s cheap house.

Only half of the church’s back wall survived the attack, along with a low, uneven, knee-high ring of stone that they climbed over. Looking at it now, it was impossible to make out where the tables and chairs would have been placed in a circle for the children to sit at during their weekly lessons. The kind of tables with unbalanced legs that rocked with each shift of the arm rested upon its surface. Writing on those kinds of tables, hitting knees against its sharp corners, was vexing to the finest.

Robin scrambled up the rubble first, avoiding the loose blocks that shifted underfoot and sent him teetering with pinwheeling, numb arms the first time he came. At a more sedated pace, Frederick followed him over the dirt-stained marble. The sunlight threaded through the strands of his hair. Within the smothered remains of the church, Robin sunk to his knees, the better to shift through the rubble and bodily toss the cracked and flame-warped roof shingles. He explained, “Libra thought there should be a register somewhere of everyone who lived here. Doubt it could survive completely intact through all this,” he waved a scraped and dirty hand before them, “but this church had a basement. Its trapdoor down was around here.”

He chucked another twisted block of metal aside. Rainwater protected from the sun by the shadows smeared across his palm. Making a face, he shook the muddy droplets off.

To confirm, Frederick asked, “You’ve been doing this every day when it’s not raining?” He made no move to kneel, though he did help Robin pry up a stubborn and heavy segment of collapsed masonry.

“No,” Robin said. Then, “Yes.”

He glanced up, strained in the eyes and with pinched, parched lips. He said, “It helps with thinking.”

Sighing, Frederick dragged over a flat and relatively dry block of stone. The chilled surface leached the warmth off his skin through the stiff fabric of his pants and he folded his hands, one over the other, his feet planted among the dirt of the dead church and its list of the dead, his elbow set against his knees. He asked, “Why are you doing this, Robin?”

* * *

The wind slid its shoulder against the walls of the house, pushing and shoving, stuffing its fingers through insufficiently patched cracks along the wood and plaster. The noise of something clattering to the ground drew Chrom’s attention away from the papers before him, pinned down by the weight of a bowl, a precariously balanced unlit candlestick, and the press of his gloved hands. He leaned over in his seat. The sandy bronze arm of the chair dug into his side. On the floor was a knocked over picture frame he hadn’t noticed earlier.

Setting a cup on the papers to keep them from curling and blowing away, Chron got up from the chair and crouched down. The roughly cut edges of the wooden frame caught against his gloves.

Pinned inside the frame was a flame charred sketch of a white-haired woman holding a young boy, her son, against her chest. The curls of her short hair framed her smooth chin and her dark eyes watched Chrom with an expression he couldn’t place, a familiar expression he’d seen on the other side of a chess board or a map spread out on a make-shift table constructed out of emptied supply boxes in the muddy tents of his army’s central command tent. Behind the boy’s tussled wisps of white hair was a small church, maybe barely large enough for two rooms.


End file.
